Sapphire Pure Black X58 Motherboard Review

The Sapphire Pure Black X58 – Overclocking

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.

The Intel Core i7 950 utilizes a bus speed of 133MHz, though the Sapphire Pure Black X58 is picking it up at 133.2MHz. Under full load the Intel Core i7 950 uses a multiplier of x23 to achieve the final clock speed of 3.07GHz. Our Intel Core i7 950 isn’t an Extreme Processor so we will limited to increasing the Bclk to achieve our overclock on the Sapphire Pure Black X58.

With a little bit of work I was able to increase the Intel Core i7 950 from 3.07GHz to 4.323GHz. We increased the Bclk from 133MHz up to 188MHz. Our final overclock of 4323MHz is an increase of nearly 41%. In order to do this we had to increase the CPU voltage up to 1.3875V

Firing up wPrime is a great way to see how much faster your system will be once you complete your overclocking. Running the 1024 Million benchmark we were able to knock off 84.835 seconds off of the total time. This is an improvement of 29.2%. You can find the BIOS settings we used here and here.